Assassin’s Creed Chronicles opens with Shao Jun stuck in a dangling cage. She is being held captive by a ‘group of corrupt eunuchs’ (i.e. Templars). It is also revealed that she was once a concubine. I feel that something could be read into this. I don’t know quite what. Maybe it’s an aggressively sex-positive story.

The game itself is a 2.5D stealth platformer. Presumably as a result of the loss of half a dimension, women have become easier for Ubisoft to animate, and so the lead for the first installment of Chronicles is a woman. Shao Jun may even be familiar to those who saw Assassin’s Creed: Embers, an animated short in which she meets Ezio Auditore—the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood. The story features the box which Ezio gave her, the Precursor box that appears throughout the Assassin’s Creed series. The actual plot is fairly sparse…